FMP Final Statement

I am pretty pleased with my final outcome despite it being drastically different from what I had initially envisioned. Initially I thought I would produce a much more complex, story driven piece but I ended up with two simple, beautiful pictures that don't have a defined story. I feel I managed to get it to a point where I leave my viewers with questions instead of answers- something which I was striving for with this project.

I feel that I have learnt a lot of things not just about photography and art but also about where my true passions lie and where I want to take my photography in future. When I first started the lens based media pathway my approach was very broad and I wasn't quite sure where my photography was headed, now I have discovered a love for fine art photography and know that I am going to pursue it further in the future.

This project really has pivoted on experimentation. I now know I really like this approach, it's a very natural and spontaneous way of coming up with ideas. This project has given me new experiences such as working with a hair/makeup artist and using the female form more in my photography. I am really excited to further explore photography using the female form in delicate, vulnerable, fragile, pure and beautiful ways.

I found it quite hard to get started and wasn't quite sure what to research initially but I think my gallery visits were very helpful and inspired me quite a bit. In future I will make sure to prioritise gallery visits as the first thing I do.

I feel like I would have liked to spend more time planning for the gallery space but instead I had to use the time I had planned for that to re-shoot my final images. I don’t know whether I would have been able to see this coming but perhaps I should give myself more time in future at the end in case this happens again. Despite being unable to in this project, I want to look into immersive and interactive gallery spaces when I have enough time as I feel it really changes the game if you are able to transport your audience into a different world.

I felt that I did well in embracing change and new ideas as there were many points where I had to switch the track of where I was headed even though that meant me sacrificing many hours of editing in order to better and simplify my final images. I was even able to change my plans at the last minute for displaying them; I removed an image and scrapped my initial framing idea in order to make sure my images were as strong as they could be.

After have countless confusing conversations with Tom I figured some things out. I now know that I don't have to explain the 'deep meaning' behind my images because I'm not that kind of guy- I don't really enjoy getting hung up on philosophy. All I want to do is create beautiful images that I love making and provoke a reaction in my audience- I think people appreciate beautiful things that make their day a little better rather than some deep art that's saying we're all truly empty inside or something! I'm really interested exploring the female form more in my images and creating new characters and fantastical worlds. It's why I love games like the Legend of Zelda so much, you can just get so involved and captivated by the interesting, enchanting, magical, expansive worlds and realities they create. It makes you appreciate the magical things in real life!
It took a while to understand this, but now I'm excited for new things that await me in photography!

If I was to give advice to anyone else doing this course I would say that continually communicating with tutors/peers throughout the project is invaluable. They bring fresh eyes and ideas to the project and often will spot things that you do not. Often this will result in having to make painful changes and backing down from coveted ideas but it is definitely worth it and will spur you to create something truly compelling, instead of just another pretty picture.

FMP Final Week

Weekend-

Finished editing pics. I had to make sure that the colours and black levels were consistent between all the images. Harder than it looks as the sun was changing a lot when we shot the images.

I decided to order 16”x16” Photorag instead of pearl as the blacks are slightly more compressed and smooth.

Monday-

Ailsa was round my house and she pointed out that the texture on pearl, although nice, may be too shiny for skin- I guess that means I made the right decision!

I picked up my prints and they looked fantastic, on the way I picked up a can of gold spray paint for some framing experiments.

I tested the spray paint on some flowers, it looks great and has a nice sparkly finish so I will use this for my frame. I also tested some scale layouts for my display board in Photoshop- I think I'm going to display my three images in a triangle as that will give a sort of magical, mystical look to them.

Wednesday-

In the morning I gathered some flowers together for the framing and did some test layouts both natural and sprayed with gold. I decided to take both sprayed and natural flowers up with me to Ravensbourne.

When I went up to mount my images I first had a chat with Tom. Tom convinced me to ditch the flowers, saying “People are going to remember you by your flowery frame and not your actual images”. I agreed with him and decided to let the images speak for themselves despite my desire to 'immerse my audience' with extra bits. Perhaps all that's needed to immerse your audience is just solid images rather than 3D spaces or extra objects outside the frame. As I was now not doing the frame we decided to keep the grey square around the circles as it would help define the gold circles rather than having them disappear into the white display board. This also would make the images much easier to cut out!

Tom also suggested that the images of the legs and arm were strong enough by themselves and didn't need the full body shot, he said the full body shot gave away too much and answered too many questions. I also agreed with this.

My prints being fragile, I made sure to stay with them during the mounting and trimming process- luckily everything went to plan. I'm pretty glad I took Tom's advice and kept the images in a square format as it was already pretty hard to cut a clean edge with the Photorag, let alone a perfect circle!

Thursday-

As I ran out of time yesterday I put my pictures up today. It was very hard to align them as they were both perfect squares, your eye notices any slight angle/size difference- I will keep in mind for future that this happens.

From now on I just powered on through until I finished all of the work to hand in! Project complete and a success!

FMP Week 7

Weekend-

Today I did my final final shoot with Ailsa! I had a quick scout around Ashtead Park where I usually shoot my photos but it turned out that right now considering my garden is so overgrown it actually made a great location for this shoot! Luckily the sun came out and we got some awesome speckled light on her skin, something quite different from my other images which pretty much all have super soft, even lighting. I reckon this will make the images a little more relate-able to the real world as opposed to the super clean studio shots. I shot quite a lot of the same images to increase my chance of the sun being in the right places. We both enjoyed the shoot and already I was confident that it was a good idea to re-shoot despite having to scrap the other images.

When we finished I started by editing one of the spur of the moment images- her hand touching the paint on her neck. I was wondering whether to keep the scenery green or to change it to match the gold paint/blood. I decided, at least for this first edit, gold suited more as it unified the colours well and brought the image together. I may change my mind later though as having a green background could make the gold paint stick out a bit more. I used a vignette to draw attention to the gold paint.

With this edit I decided to hold back on the tone evening as I usually do on my other images; instead I accentuated the different variations of tone in the skin. I think it really added to the vulnerable look and made the fairy much more relatable with the ‘real world’.

Monday-

I finished editing the first image and did a test print, it came out pretty good and I only noticed a few detail changes I would make. Moses pointed out that the gold paint looked a little bit too dry (which it was) and I may need to go back in and make it look a little more liquid like.

I really like the first image ‘Marked’ but I’m not sure how I would fit it in with the rest as it is the only non-square format image, it may turn out to be another nice standalone image to add to the collection (which is definitely not a bad thing!).

I started editing a couple other photos from the shoot, currently they are in a circle format but I may change my mind about that soon.

After spending a little time with these images I am pretty pleased that I decided to simplify my idea even if it meant leaving my previous work behind- it was a sacrifice I had to make. These images evoke curiosity instead of giving you the story on a plate.

Wednesday-

I finished editing ‘Wounded’ (the legs image), I settled on the turquoise-green rather than gold as I feel it draws more attention to the gold paint- you can see it’s a different colour to everything else.
I kept the circle format; I think it works very well to produce an old fashioned fairy tale feel and not a modern, boxy feel. I added grey outside of the circle but this may get removed when I mount it.

Thursday-

I went to The Print Space and had a chat with one of the staff there- she showed me all of the papers I could print on, both C-Type and Giclee. Giclee seemed the more obvious choice for fine art as the papers had a much more textural feel. The lady helping me suggested Photorag as she thought the the more soft dreamy look would suit my work. The only downside to Photorag is that it is very fragile and if you run your nail along the surface the ink comes off- so I chose another paper to test as well (Pearl) that had a similar nice texture but was far less fragile.
I went home and ordered test strips of one of my images on both of these papers- I will decide which is better when I get them back tomorrow.

The test strips I ordered are 20” long, but thinking about the size of 3 of these it’s quite big. I may get 15” or 12” prints instead depending on the size of our display. (I still haven’t got the accurate dimensions of the display yet!)

I will talk to Tom about whether he feels photorag would survive the mounting process as it’s being done at Ravensbourne.

Friday-

I picked up my prints- looks like the Pearl has a nicer, more obvious texture than the Photorag. We also got the dimensions of the display boards- I worked out that the best print size would be 15”x15”. I made some sketches of layouts that I might use, at the moment I think a triangle arrangement would look best- the layout determines whether things are looked at as a story or a hierarchy or as one image. I also found out about the mounting process, it looks like it won’t harm the paper. Also thinking about border, I could do it with flowers (have to be careful with getting good gold paint) or I could do it with gold leaf.

FMP Week 6

Weekend
Did my final shoot for the second image of Mae, it was quite hard to get the hair looking right so we decided in the end to cover it mostly with flowers- I think after some touching up in Photoshop it should look fine. I think I definitely need to be more invested in planning the hair beforehand as it is a very important part of the image. After we had shot the pictures I needed we made use of the makeup and the sun outside and did a few more shots just for fun of fairies in the wild. Shooting outdoors is great because it allows much more room for spontaneous ideas and inspiration because of the environment you're in. It differs a lot from being stuck in a studio, but of course then you can meticulously plan your photos and lighting which yields a different kind of result.

Tuesday-
Did more editing and had a conversation with Tom. We had a pretty long conversation about what I wanted to say with my art. He brought up the fact that I shouldn't just be regurgitating what I hear in the media etc but actually show my own views- something that really makes me tick. I had a think about it and I came up with this:

In fact I'm not really going to go in to details as the reason I'm a photographer is to communicate through imagery and not through writing this blog post! I tried to write it out many times but it just felt kind of wrong and wasn't me, the short story is I got thinking about my real motives for this project and I'm now considering that while editing these images.

Wed/Thurs-
More editing today- now I'm getting so far into it I'm starting to be less happy with the images. Perhaps I'm overdoing it or heading down the wrong path? I will talk to the tutors again tomorrow.

Friday-
Talk with Othello and Chris- realised I need to reshoot with a simpler concept. Othello was saying he really liked my 'Bleed' and 'Flightless' images for their simplicity in visuals and concept. I decided to look through my Pinterest board where I save all of my inspiration and noticed that most of the pictures I've pinned recently are simple, delicate portrayals of the female form. I then got sketching and came up with the idea to put the gold liquid like I had for the 'Flightless' image on the female form in different positions- and no extra frills. I think this should work much better and raise more questions. Luckily Ailsa is free to shoot over the weekend, so fingers crossed this goes well!

FMP Week 5

Tuesday-
Today was a tube strike so I decided to stay at home and get on with editing the picture of Ailsa and the flowers. It took quite a while to fake all the skin where her bra originally was, I think if I'm going to keep doing more of these nearly-nude photos then perhaps I need to find another model who would be comfortable showing a bit more as it would take forever if I had to do this on every shoot. I think it's okay for now though. I had to add in a few extra flowers to cover up her chest a bit more as during the shoot it was quite hard to balance the flowers around there. I used the same drip photos as before to add some coming out of the flowers on her chest.


Wednesday-
I had originally planned another shoot with Ailsa to possibly get a 'fairy in natural environment before everything went wrong' picture but the weather was not that great so we decided to postpone it until the weekend. I could have shot the images but I wouldn't have gotten the lovely speckled sun coming through the trees.

Friday- Today I went back to the Natural History Museum to get a cleaner, sharper picture of the cicada wings to possibly use on the current picture. I also popped in to the Science Museum to look at pipes/steam powered contraptions. I had ideas to possibly put some pipes and machinery at the edge of the picture to look like Ailsa was lying on some sort of steampunk operating table, I'm not super sure about this idea- it could be too much.

FMP Week 4

Tues-

Today I had a jam-packed day of gallery visits. I first went to the Barbican to see the current installation 'experience' they had at the moment, I wanted to see how other artists were engaging their audiences. When I entered the room it was completely dark and I instantly lost my sense of direction, but as my eyes adjusted I could see faint lights in the distance. As I walked towards the lights I could make out the silhouettes of other people in the light, there were also faint sounds coming from the lights, the swinging of the lights was mesmerising, I could go on. Basically, it was pretty great experience that successfully captivated me and transported me to another world- I could definitely take a leaf out of this book.

Next I went to the Ronchini to go see some photography, I have to say this experience was far less exciting and immersive as the Barbican. The shop front was really the only redeeming feature, it was completely filled with on of the photographer's images which was nice and invited you in. When I got inside things weren't as great, everything was very squashed together in a very small space and there was an office space that was practically merged with the gallery space. There also wasn't enough interesting detail in the images to actually warrant seeing them in full size, to be honest I got exactly the same experience just viewing the same images on the website! The one funny thing was that this gallery was situated just off Oxford St and if I'm honest the clothing stores were a much better experience than the gallery!

Wed-

Today I did a shoot with Ailsa- this one was quite experimental. We tried out different poses that were inspired by sculptures I had seen at the V&A, it was quite hard to get it right when using an actual human with all the inflexibility, kinks and bulges of a human body. In the end we opted for a simpler pose which wouldn't squash or contort any part of the body, in the end it turned out to be quite effective. One challenge I had to overcome was the trouble with getting the angle of view right when taking a picture straight down, also the challenge of fitting most of Ailsa in the frame without going too wide angle. I managed to stand right on the top of a ladder positioned at her knee level and stretched my camera out to her chest level, pointed straight down to avoid enlarging her lower body. I used a 35mm (50mm eqiv.) lens to get adequate compression for this type of shot. We took shots of the flowers separately for each part of her body to multiply the few flowers I had so they could cover enough of her body.

Thurs-

Edited 'Bleed' image, main shot would be 3/4 length- but I liked the framing of this shot with central focus on flowers. Had good idea with running paint when I had time to sit down with the images. I often find myself coming up with new ideas after I've finished the shoot.

Shot paint running down my arm and shopped it in.

Friday-
Today we had interim assessments but instead of being assessed by tutors we did peer assessments. I was put with Alice and Greta, both of whom had very different projects. When I was looking at Alice's work I noticed her sketchbook was very in depth and she had done a lot of research into psychology and other theoretical things. I could definitely take a leaf out of her book in that area, I don't think I work in quite the same way as her but I can definitely be inspired by her process. It was quite helpful having the crit with Alice as she had strong research but weaker experimentation while I had strong experimentation but weaker research- we swapped tips. Greta had an interesting project. She was creating a website, which is all fine and dandy, but she was in the Lens Based pathway so we weren't too sure how this fit. She was also focusing more on the coding side rather than the design side, we gave her some advice that she might need to focus a bit more on the design as that's what will actually be marked- fingers crossed she did some good design stuff after that!

FMP Week 3

Day 1-
Today I finished editing my image titled ‘Vulnerable’ which was one of the spur of the moment shots from the shoot with Ailsa. I often find that a lot of good ideas come when I least expect them- I should remember to not get too hung up on necessarily meticulously planning everything in advance and leave some room to be freely creative.

One thing I had to tackle while editing today was the fact that initially your eye was lead to the top of the frame to the dress as it was the brightest point; I wanted the viewer to instead be drawn to the flowers at the bottom. I tried various ways of drawing attention to the flowers, initially I created a glow behind the flowers but that ended up just washing the flowers out. What ended up working was increasing the saturation in the flowers as your eye is not only drawn to the brightest and biggest element in the image but also the most saturated. I learnt this concept in Lindsay Adler’s posing video, it will be especially handy when I come to do more busy compositions.

When I initially exported the image to upload online I did my standard thing of raising the black levels to give the image a more painterly feel but after looking at similar images with deeper blacks I decided I might have been taking too much black out. I uploaded a few different versions and I eventually settled on a version where the blacks were still raised but to a lesser degree than before. The image with pure black was just a bit too modern-looking for my liking.

Easter Weekend- 

Shot 'Scandal of Grace' playing off the same theme as my gold fairy tears/blood
You could look at the Easter story as being similar to my story of the fairies, they are innocent but yet abused- just as Jesus was.